Glyn Ford says Trump was a predictable accident waiting to happen. Labour needs to stand firm against “divide and conquer”.
Four years ago I wrote, “Biden’s victory over Trump’s nativist xenophobia, blithe racism and shiftless authoritarianism is pause – not cause – for celebration”. “All the more so with Trump threatening to emulate and reprise Grover Cleveland, the only president (1885-89, 1893-97) to recapture the White House after a defeat. Trump’s mobs of devotees – unless beaten by biology – still make him the favourite for the 2024 Republican nomination if he wants it. (Chartist, January/February 2021) November saw the chickens have duly come home to roost, aided and abetted by Joe Biden’s criminal pardoning of his son Hunter. In this sole act Biden did more damage to US democracy than Trump managed in his first four years and gifted him the keys to serial subversion of the rule of law.
Why did Kamala lose? There will be endless excuses and explanations, but the writing was long on the wall. Trump is more the product of American politics than its driver. He was a long awaited accident waiting to happen, ushered centre-stage by US misogyny in 2016 that doubled up with racism in 2024 to make his first wafer thin victory more comprehensive – albeit still narrow – at the second time of asking. The interim was when Biden and America liberalism come up for the third time before drowning in angry rural and “left behind” reaction. The aftermath has seen Democrats in denial. The just one more heave school still commands centre-stage. On this basis the Democratic cavalry will not be riding, trumpets sounding, to rescue history in 2028.
The EU – and UK – badly misdirected themselves in 2020 when they turned Nelson’s eye as to the direction of travel and instead lent on deep faith that it was normal service restored and not history’s speed-bump. Yet Biden was the aberration and Trump the new normal. “Be prepared” was not to darken Europe’s agenda, instead unctuous compliance reigned. As Biden looked to US interests at home and abroad, the only question – whether it was the China threat or Iranian backsliding, US tariffs on EU steel and aluminium or Washington’s purposeful sabotage of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – Europe’s only answer when asked to jump in line was “how high”?
It was four wasted years. Now at exactly the wrong time, the EU’s only resort will be “leaderless resistance”; much favoured by terrorist and insurgent groups, but rarely by governments. Both wheels are off the Franco-German axis. Macron self-harming with last July’s National Assembly elections saw the Barnier government’s early collapse leaving him dependent on the Socialists for stopgap salvation, while Scholz in Berlin saw his tariff light coalition sabotaged by the yellow Liberals. Here the February election will likely be seeing even a Grand Coalition of SPD and CDU/CSU bereft of a commanding majority and dependent on the Greens or Sarah Wagenknecht’s “national communists”; a gift deferred for the Neo-Nazi AFD
Trump’s first iteration threatened both EU trade and security with WTO incompatible tariffs and blackmail demands for sharp increases in defence spending to the benefit of America’s Military-Industrial Complex and pocket. Trump redux will play the same hand on steroids. To “Make America Great Again” US jobs are to be pickled, restored and re-shored, corralled behind 360 degree tariff walls. If Trump is foolish enough – and few are arguing against – there will be a virtual trade embargo against Beijing and crippling tariffs against the EU. Pushed by Biden, Brussels is already alienating Beijing, its biggest trading partner. The EU car industry is in crisis as a consequence of the internal retreat from its climate goals led by the EU’s own resurgent right and external reaction from Beijing to the crippling tariffs imposed on Chinese electric vehicles. Any across the board 20% tariff on EU exports to the US would turn crisis into catastrophe. Even if Brussels forces through the new Mercosur Trade Deal over the dead body of French farming the prospects are grim.
Medieval criminals were expected to pay the costs of their own torture and death. Washington will attempt to divide and conquer. Starmer and Labour must reject any offer of a lighter punishment beating. Both the EU and UK need to break the chains that bind and look to their own economic and security interests. A balanced relationship with Washington and Beijing, whose geometry reflects our interests, not theirs, with a European security framework that prioritises Moscow’s threat to Ukraine and the EU borderlands over the South China Sea, alongside a domestic European Defence industry geared to supply EU needs. If the dawning of Trump 2 is not a wake up call the continent may sleep for a thousand years.